teaching

This course provides an introduction into the technologies behind cloud computing. A combination of lectures and hands-on programming assignments expose the student to the leading cloud computing paradigms and programming interfaces (e.g., EC2, Lambda). In addition, lectures provide an overview of the underlying technological concepts that make cloud computing possible (e.g., virtualization, scalability, fault tolerance, security).

Next generation mobile and IoT applications, such as intelligent personal assistants, medical patient monitoring, and intelligent transportation systems, are not compatible with the existing cloud computing model where applications are deployed on a small number of extremely large datacenters accessible over the wide area network. These applications require either low latencies that are not achievable over the wide area, or produce large volumes of data that can overwhelm the network. Edge computing is a new paradigm that addresses these issues by expanding the traditional cloud architecture with additional datacenter layers that provide computation and storage closer to the end user. For example, a wide-area cloud datacenter which serves a large country can be augmented by a hierarchy of datacenters that provides coverage at the city, neighborhood, and building level. This course provides an overview of some of the current research directions in edge computing.